In January...Ride the Changes

Descriptor:

• Changes help us grow and learn
• Skill building and confidence building activities
• Resolutions, overcoming barriers to challenges
• Making change

Public Service Announcement:

• We challenge you to look at change as possibility.  Let’s see it from a new perspective as an opportunity to grow and learn.

Thought for the Month:

• “Perhaps we can’t control it but we can learn to ride it … like rapids on a great river.  To take advantage of the flow and use it to take us where we want to go.  To live in uncertainty, and yet act with confidence.” - Dewitt Jones
• “I can choose to think, feel and act.  No other person makes me feel a certain way.”-Anonymous
• “There are no unresourceful students, only unresourceful states.” - Anonymous
• “Change the state and behaviour is changed.” - Anonymous

Suggested Whole School Events/Activities:

• Plan to have an art show of student generated motivational celebration posters.
• Make a journal circulate through the school and have individuals make entries on skills being built, resolutions being mastered and .or barriers overcome.

Classroom Activities:

• Prepare Celebrate buttons or Celebrate calling cards to go out to individuals in the community.
• Do art work for the Virtual Gallery of Health.
• Have students write a short story on what new talent they are developing or maybe it is a positive change in their life (New Years resolution) they are working on mastering.
• Have students develop positive catch words, high five (secret handshake) or gesture unique to Celebrate.

Suggested Reading:

• Helping Your Kids Cope With Divorce the Sandcastle Way * - M.Gary Neuman
• Oma’s Quilt (E)* - Paulette Bourgeois
• Stargirl (M/H)* - Jerry Spinelli
• Chrysanthemum (E)*- Kevin Henkes
• Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge (E)* - Mem Fox
• It’s Hard to be Five (E)* - Jamie Lee Curtis & Laura Cornell
• When Bad Thing Happen (Grades 2-4) - Lori Little
• Some Things Are Scary (E)* - Florence Parry Heide
• “I Think I Can, I Know I Can!”(E)* - Susan Issacs & Wendy Ritchey, Ph.D.
• What You Can See You Can Be!  - David Anderson
• Baseball Ballerina* - Kathryn Cristaldi

Resources:

• It’s Up to Me  by Joanne Nelson (Primarily Health, a resource for elementary)
• For a special collection of health care resources available through the NB Public Library System you may go to http://www.mindcare.ca/MindCareBibliography5thedition.pdf

Supplementary Resources (found in the green hanging file folder):

• Teachers Guide from the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (see attached)
• Mental Health Fitness Tips
• Celebrate What’s Right with the World DVD by Dewitt Jones & Leader’s Guide
• List of Other Recommended Literature
• Information on 40 Developmental Assets